Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to determining gunfire detections, and more specifically, utilizing sensors for determining miss distance and bullet speed of a burst of bullets.
Brief Description of Related Art
During high tension gunfights, sensors may be used in a platform, such as a stationary structure or a vehicle (e.g., aircraft) to determine the origin and trajectory of fired rounds/bullets. Example bullet may be any projectile such as a bullet, artillery shell, missile, bombs, or other object that exhibit the characteristics consistent with a bullet in flight. The bullet may be propelled from a firearm. Some existing methods may use electro-optic (EO) sensors to detect the gunfire, while some other methods may use acoustical sensors. Further, some existing methods may attempt to combine utilizing both EO and acoustical sensors, however, this may require an increased correlative element and certainty that data points collected from the EO sensors match the associated data points collected by the acoustical sensors. Failure to do so may result in irrelevant correlations of data points with respect to bullets from multiple gunmen interfering.
Typically, the EO and acoustic sensor detections may be fused “round to round”, i.e., attempting to correlate between a single EO detection and a single acoustic detection. In the single round approach, one sensor may detect a round while the other fails to detect the round. For example, the EO sensors can only detect some of rounds whereas acoustic sensors can potentially detect all the rounds. Further, in case where both sensors detect a round, the EO round detection may be paired with an incorrect acoustically detected round.